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Comment by jinushaun | Hacker News Reader

It’s pretty clear that ICE is the seed of a paramilitary force.

I fully expect to see them take on more and more roles that e.g. the FBI traditionally performed. The strategy appears to be to expand, empower, and control them as the "MAGA law enforcement agency" and bypass all the rest, either seconding them to ICE or diminishing them to a tiny role.

Look to see them expand to general "counter-terrorism" enforcement in the near future, with only the barest veneer (if that) of its having anything to do with immigration enforcement. After all, if you can stop practically anyone on baseless suspicion of being in the country illegally (see: recent precedent that apparently "they looked foreign" is enough) then charge them with whatever after-the-fact even if they turned out to be legal residents or citizens, that sure looks like a neat little work-around for due process. Or you can just "accidentally" disappear them to El Salvador....

I think about the minor plot point of the President having dissolved the FBI, in the film Civil War, a lot more this year than I ever thought I would when I watched that movie the first time.

Also, considering https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone that’s the right group legally speaking to use to get around constitutional issues.

A force with significant capability to surveil US citizens.

> Together, these teams would operate as intelligence arms of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. They will receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests. [...] The scope of information contractors are expected to collect is broad. Draft instructions specify open-source intelligence: public posts, photos, and messages on platforms from Facebook to Reddit to TikTok. [...]

> They would also be armed with powerful commercial databases such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR, which knit together property records, phone bills, utilities, vehicle registrations, and other personal details into searchable files.

Which capability has been iteratively built out for decades across multiple administrations against the consistent professional recommendation and public outcry of engineers, civil rights advocates, and some citizenry, and has at last landed in the malicious hands we've been warning about.

Nothing here is either surprising or unpredicted. It's just ugly because it's finally happening.

If it makes you feel any better, I can assure you we've been using these technologies all along. Only we used it for people we claimed were "street criminals" and "gang members". It's just that now we're rolling it out to have society-wide control instead of just using it for what we were told was simply "pacifying inner-cities".

If I were a man given to being suspicious, I'd swear that the whole time using these technologies for "street criminals" and "gang members" was never about "pacifying inner-cities" at all. I'd be inclined to think that maybe it was just the equivalent of the beta test.

But I'm not given to being suspicious. So I know that whole way of thinking is just nutty. right?

Yep, this is all (MAGA's rapid judo-flip and complete capture of the entire Republican apparatus, that right-wing authoritarian nationalism is popular at all, the legal and bureaucratic machinery being in place to enable authoritarianism) built on stuff that's been going on since the '70s. That's when the wave of neutering antitrust and deregulating media started, and that's what got us most of four decades of persistent unchallenged lies, dehumanization campaigns, and racism blasted at the public. Nixon's roughly the start of the current movement as far as direct action (the think tanks driving it precede him by a decade or two, but hadn't had much effect before him), with the cynical "war on drugs" aimed at enflaming racial animosity and providing tools to attack political opponents, and of course his downfall and pardon were what lit a flame under a lot of right-wingers' asses to re-make reality such that their crimes wouldn't have consequences again (Reagan and some Nixon alums would soon make early use of this, and test the "if we all just keep telling obvious lies and don't break ranks... can we maybe just get away with whatever we want?" strategy, which turned out to work wonderfully)

All of what we're seeing is built on an electorate that was primed to elect Trump. The Republicans had been using them as a captured base to enable their neoliberal and imperialist policies, but they'd conditioned these folks to want Trumpism, not what they were actually delivering. The shit Trump says is largely the same shit you'd hear from Republican voters since at least the '90s, and what he does is largely shit they want done. They've been asking for e.g. authoritarian federal government crack-downs on cities since then, asking for reductions in law enforcement accountability, asking for no-due-process mass deportations, asking for pulling back from NATO, asking for a wall at the border and/or a militarized border, et c. Their media's been telling them all democratic organizations and the party itself are to-the-core rotten criminal enterprises and they believe that. They will cheer when ICE starts arresting members of congress and major democratic donors on dubious charges.

Given their recent actions in Chicago and elsewhere, it's clear they already are a paramilitary force.

And just in case people scrolling by haven't heard about the atrocities ICE has committed in Chicago, they were, quite literally, zip-tying naked children. They raided a residential building, detained multiple US citizens, wasted tax payer money, all to arrest a group of people who are statistically less violent than actual citizens.

And if anyone is still under the illusion that this is about "law enforcement" or "immigration", this should be a giant waving red flag that it's about racism and authoritarian control.

I'd say seedling now.

It'll be interesting to see how the Democrats use this ramped-up and militarized ICE when they're next in power. I don't imagine they'll be disbanding it.

> … Democrats … next in power.

I admire your optimism.

Is it true there like 15 Million undocumented people in the country?

I thought there were like 1 million max.

By definition, it is impossible to count this accurately and can only be estimated from shadow variables.

They've been saying 11 million for at least a couple decades that I can remember. It's probably a lot higher now, but no one in a position to find out has ever wanted to know.

Nobody really knows the true number.

You are naive if you think this is about undocumented folks.

And half of the country is cheering them on.

A key lesson is that there is always a large proportion of the population which will cheer this kind of action.

You can't lay blame on the people doing this and feel like you're done. Unfortunately they're always going to exist. You have to lay blame on the people defending against them. They failed in their defense and here we are.

The difficulty in stopping it scales with how long you let it fester.

Last time it was a world war which could have threatened extinction.

We're still in the phase where people are hoping doing nothing will make it all better or denying outright the threat.

Instead of this "lay[ing] blame" nonsense, we focus on owning our own personal responsibility and build from there. Without that solid foundation everything else eventually crumbles and we are no good for ourselves -- let alone others

My personal responsibilty involves holding the representatives I voted for accountable for their actions... or lack thereof and to call out anyone with the "we didn't do it, we were helpless to do anything" attitude.

Liberals and conservatives don't split support in the country 50/50.

It's more like 20/20 and then that apathetic majority who can't be bothered to care enough to even vote is the rest. Given the nature of liberal and conservative policies, we can all probably see why many of them would be apathetic if we're being honest. But I'm sure those people aren't cheering. They're moreso saying, "See. I told ya so." To any friends and family who thought Trump would be any different. Probably gleefully pointing out to friends who are liberal or conservative that now things are worse.

For that "apathetic majority", they probably now feel vindicated in their decision not to vote and their sense of hopelessness.

And that's sad.

The apathetic majority are just as responsible as the group supporting the current power

Indeed. The timeline is probably going to play out like this:

2025: Get downvoted on HN for comparing Charlie Kirk to Horst Wessel

2026: Get upvoted for it

2027: Get banned for it

2028: No voting allowed, here or anywhere else

The question is when in this timeline will you get arrested or at least detained for questioning for it? We’re already at the point where you might get fired or deported for it.

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